Magasin recently went live on the eCommera CoreCommerce platform just in time for the Christmas period. Well done to all involved!

I have been in Las Vegas this week at Shop.org. There appeared to be more vendors and attendees than last year which is surprising given the economic climate. Just proves ecommerce is a good investment in a downturn. It has also been a useful visit to catch up with our partners face to face, e.g. Demandware, Coremetrics, etc. and talk about strategies. I am now about to board my flight home.

Myself and the rest of the management team have been working hard this year to secure a second round of funding. More details can be found here.

We have just completed upgrading all eCommera retailers to Demandware 2.10. Demandware 2.10 is a major upgrade and includes powerful new Searchandising functionality.

Using Demandware 2.10 our retailers are able to specify sort orders at any level within the category hierarchy, e.g. Sort the following category, Mens > Clothing > Underwear, by blend of, Date Added (desc, 10%), Stock (desc, 10%), Sales Velocity (desc, 10%), Margin (desc, 20%), Relevancy (desc, 50%). This functionality increases the efficiency of merchandisers and should increase revenues.

Additionally retailers are now able to define Dynamic Customer Segments and therefore display different promotional content to different customer segments, e.g. display DVD player promotion to customers who have bought a TV in the last 60 days.

These are just two examples of the powerful new functionality available in the eCommera CoreCommerce platform.

We are in the process of adding Coremetrics Intelligent Offer integration to the eCommera CoreCommerce platform. My team are working on this and we hope the Coremetrics Intelligent Offer integration will be available to our retailers in Oct 2009. Coremetrics Intelligent Offer provides intelligent Dynamic Recommendations functionality, e.g. People who bought this also bought these, cross sell and upsell. This functionality not only increases revenues but improves the efficiencies of merchandisers. Coremetrics Intelligent Offer competes with, Baynote, RichRelevance, etc.
The eCommera CoreCommerce platform already includes support for Coremetrics Web Analytics, Coremetrics Explore, Coremetrics LIVEmail, Coremetrics SitePromotion and Coremetrics Image Tagging.

I am pleased to announce that we are in the process of adding PayPal integration to the eCommera CoreCommerce platform. My team are hard at work on this and we hope the PayPal integration will be available to our retailers in Oct 2009.

The eCommera CoreCommerce platform currently supports the following payment / fraud integrations, DataCash, PPT, PBS / Auriga and The Third Man.

I am in Helsinki, Finland today for the kick off meeting for one of our new retailers. This will be a true multi-language (11 languages initially) and multi-currency (3 currencies initially) website. The website will also have B2B functionality in addition to B2C.

My team are also very close to launching our first website in Denmark just in time for Christmas trading.

Despite the tough economic climate eCommera is still expanding and I have recently recruited an additional Project Manager and an additional Solutions Architect to deal with new on-boardings and in life enhancements.

I am also continuing to expand our offshore operation in Sofia, Bulgaria where we have recently recruited additional, Developers, Test Analysts / QA Analysts and Technical Support Analysts. We now have many tens of people in our Sofia office.

I have been thinking about getting an iPhone for a while. This is saying something because I am not an Apple fan. Apple hardware IMHO is very nice but very expensive. Too expensive! And why pay all that money to be restricted in what applications you can run. iTunes (like Google toolbar/desktop) is a bit like a virus always trying to install itself. For instance every time I use Safari to check for updates to Safari the Apple Update Manager wants to install iTunes and QuickTime even though they are not installed.

I have always been put off by the iPhones lack of copy & paste, SMS forwarding, etc. functionality. I have been waiting for the latest version of the iPhone OS and then hardware to address these shortcomings. Anyhow I have taken the plunge and purchased one now they are out.

I have to say the iPhone 3GS is very good. The screen is large, crystal clear and bright. The touch sensitive screen is accurate and very responsive. The iPhone 3GS is very fast. No waiting around for applications to load. Safari is lightening fast, particularly over wifi connections. The iPhone 3GS is very quick to connect to wifi networks and switching between cellular and wifi is transparent. Call quality is what you would expect. The builtin apps are very good, polished and consistent. The synchronisation with Microsoft Exchange appears to work very well so far too. The whole thing is very slick and very polished.

I don’t miss my HTC Touch Pro. This is one of the few devices that lives up to the hype. One downside is the battery life even with wifi turned off. Make sure you carry your USB charger cable. It is a small price to pay though. The other downside is the need to install iTunes.

I posted the other day that I am evaluating Ubuntu. The experience so far hasn’t been good. Ubuntu 9.04 comes with Firefox 3 so I decided to try and update this to Firefox 3.5. I couldn’t find Firefox 3.5 under Add/Remove Programs so I launched Firefox 3 to see if it had a Check For Updates feature. I couldn’t find such a feature so I went to the Mozilla website to download Firefox 3.5. The Mozilla website recognised that I was using a Linux based operating system. I downloaded Firefox 3.5 expecting the downloaded file to be some kind of installer but instead it was a compressed archive file. The Readme.txt file contained no useful information. I am sure I could extract the files to a folder and run an executable and that would launch Firefox 3.5 but that would leave Firefox 3 installed on my machine probably as my default browser. Rather than waste anymore time trying to get Firefox 3.5 installed I decided to use Firefox 3 to visit the BBC iPlayer website. Firefox informed me that plugins were missing. I opted to install the missing plugins. I was presented with 3 Flash Player plugins. Why three!?! I tried every one yet none of them would install. This is insane, hugely frustrating and a complete waste of time. I will try to persevere but my initial impression is it isn’t ready for prime time.